578 TEE UNIVERSE. 



From time to time vestiges of our species had been found 

 among the debris of animals which had become extinct in 

 the latest revolutions of our globe. 



On the other hand, a learned archaeologist, M. Boucher 

 de Perthes, supported by the most laudable perseverance, 

 succeeded in collecting a tolerably large number of flint in- 

 struments, which had clearly belonged to pre-historic races 

 of men destroyed in the great diluvian catastrophe. 



There was no longer any doubt in the mind of the illus- 

 trious Lyell. These implements shaped out of flint, axes, 

 arrow-heads, and knives, which are found in the drift, 

 were the work of a race which preceded ours, a race which 

 was contemporary with the cave-bears and hyenas, and 

 even with the rhinoceroses and elephants, which formerly 

 inhabited our soil, and of which we find only the fossilized 

 remains. 1 



1 M. Boucher de Perthes has just made a discovery as fortunate as it was un- 

 expected, which confirms his former views. He has at last found in the drift 

 gravel, in the neighborhood of Abbeville, human remains mixed with flint imple- 

 ments. These precious remains consisted of a human tooth and jaw, and were 

 found at a depth of nearly fifteen feet. The concurrence of opinion among the 

 English and French naturalists who examined these relics leaves no room for 

 doubt; they belong to a race of men anterior to the deluge. 



[It seems difficult to understand how any unprejudiced person who has really 

 examined the evidence can refuse to believe that man lived on this globe many 

 thousands of years before histpry began. It is as certain as anything can be that 

 flint implements wrought by human hands have been found, not in one or two, 

 but in many places, especially undisturbed caves, beneath or embedded in stalag- 

 mite containing remains of the great cave-bear, the cave-hyena, the mammoth, 

 cave-lion, and rhinoceros, and that man's era certainly goes back to at any rate 

 the decline of the great glacial period, even if he did not exist before it. They 

 have been met with also in river-drifts interbedded with the bones of the mam- 

 moth and rhinoceros, and in fresh-water formations, together with the bones of 

 the elephant. The Stream of Life on our Globe, chap. ii. TR.] 



